The Boy Who Didn’t Want To Die
Peter’s latest book is an extraordinary true story of his childhood. As a boy of five, he was deported from a small provincial town in Hungary to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the fateful summer of 1944. His father died there of starvation, but he and his mother survived. This is a story of love, hope and survival.
Graphic memoir: The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die
First published in January 2023 as a memoir for children, The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die was widely acclaimed, selected as the Times Children’s Book of the Week, winning the UKLA Non-Fiction Prize and being shortlisted for Best Children’s Non-Fiction book at the British Book Awards.
This new illustrated edition brings Peter’s story to a new audience, with phenomenal illustrations from Victoria Stebleva.
By the age of 30, Peter Lantos had survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was beaten by the Communist police in Hungary, qualified in medicine, defected to England, sentenced to imprisonment for this “crime” in his absence and had established a career in academic medicine in London. And this was only the beginning. Read more about Peter.
After retirement, it was his childhood experiences which gave him the impetus to write Parallel Lines: a Journey from Childhood to Belsen, published in 2006 by Arcadia Books London, reprinted in 2007 and translated into Hungarian, German and Italian. The book has attracted unanimously favourable reviews, and Alan Sillitoe described it as “something of a genius with the readability of a classic.” It has been reprinted again with a new cover and a Foreword by Lisa Appignanesi in February 2014. It featured both on BBC radio and television and has been reprinted five times and again by Quercus in 2023.
His first novel, Closed Horizon, is a vision of the near future in the Republic of Great Britain, where conflicts between individuals and the Surveillance State create complex moral dilemmas. It is a story of loyalty and betrayal, guilt and forgiveness, blackmail and courage. In the words of Baroness Helena Kennedy QC: “A brilliant and terrifying novel about the fragility of freedom” (see Books.)
Peter has written six plays, published in two books: Stolen Lives (2018) and Love and Obsession (2021) (see Plays).
